


What Words Cannot Say

by leathansparrow



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-06
Updated: 2012-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 17:18:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leathansparrow/pseuds/leathansparrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A simple business excursion, a paddle boat, and a journey in search of something Arthur believes he will never learn. Alfred is trying to say something, but Arthur cannot hear him. Set around 1846 on the Mississippi River.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Words Cannot Say

He steps across the waxed wooden planks, onto the polished deck and Arthur doesn’t feel anything change. It’s just a boat. It’s a beautiful boat, large for just a river, even one as mighty as the Mississippi. Arthur thinks, frankly, that it’s a little much, all white, black trimmed, with its garish (brilliant) red paddle wheel and towering smoke stacks spewing steam overhead. Still, even seeing the fancy of it, nothing seems strange. He’s here on business anyway, no reason to think anything’s strange beyond the odd, fanciful vehicle he’s boarded. It’s romantic almost, this boat. Just the sort of thing he’d think up. So Arthur doesn’t feel something shift, twist and change, and maybe it never did. It doesn’t matter, but later he feels as if it should have.

He doesn’t expect to see him here. Why should he? Doesn’t the brat have other things to do? He’s off in the west building his railroads, exploring the forgotten wilderness of it, out east with his new inventions, down south with his plantations and cotton and lovely lasses. He’s warring with Mexico and there’s that whole thing with Texas that’s just come in. Looking back on it Arthur wonders how Alfred kept track of it all, everything he was up too. It was so much all at once, and only more to come.

He’s sitting on the rail, Alfred is, when Arthur comes onto the deck. He’s just leaning there, perched, with his feet tucked up and balanced like he could fall at any time. Like he should fall, because even if this isn’t the sea, the boat is rocking and Alfred’s never really had sea legs to speak of. There’s a book in his lap (Arthur can’t see the title, and Alfred doesn’t look up to show him) and a straw hat on his head. His ankles are showing beneath too-short trousers and his feet are calloused, bare and brown. Arthur wants to say something, tell the boy he raised him better than that, but Alfred looks comfortable, too comfortable, and Arthur chalks his resistance up to the uselessness of saying anything at all. No amount of practice or teaching can make a wild thing a gentleman. So he turns away and lifts his briefcase and thinks maybe Alfred hasn’t noticed him.

He knows it’s a lie, but Alfred seems willing to indulge it. Or perhaps his book is just that interesting.

It’s not really until that evening that they meet. Well, that they talk at least, somewhat. Alfred’s still on the railing where Arthur left him, but the book is gone and there’s a banjo in his hands. He’s picking the strings, playing out nothing Arthur can make sense of. 

“You look bored, old man,” is the first thing he says. Arthur frowns at it and doesn’t deign him with a response. Alfred just snorts and nods to the glass table behind Arthur. “You’d like that one,” Alfred tells him. There’s a magazine on the table, dog-eared and wrinkled from the humid air. Arthur fingers the cover.

“The New York Evening Mirror?” he asks disdainfully. “You suppose I’d enjoy your outlandish rubbish?” He sits down anyway, and Alfred’s aimless plucking gives way to what Arthur thinks might be a tune. It’s hard to tell; Alfred keeps fiddling with it.

“Yeah,” he says finally, pushing his glasses (glasses? When did he get those? They look strange on him, too big, and they keep sliding down his nose) back into place. “They’re creepy, you’d like them.” Arthur likes to think he sees Alfred shiver, but his hands are still moving on the banjo without pause. 

Arthur’s quest is a simple one. He has business in St. Louis. Hell, everyone seems to have business there these days. It’s the largest town west of Pittsburg and with all sorts of profitable things coming out of it, and though he and Alfred might not be on the best of terms, Alfred’s always been pretty loose about business. Arthur’s just here to take advantage. Why else would he bother?

Arthur stares at the glasses falling down Alfred’s nose and fingers the cover of the Evening Mirror. There’s a page marked. He opens it to the banjo’s tune and removes the yellowed slip of paper. “Once upon a midnight dreary…” he reads the first lines, passing his finger over the author’s name. “I thought you disliked scary stories.”

There’s a shiver in Alfred’s hands, Arthur sees it this time, even if the song is steady. There’s a smile on Alfred’s face, even as his lips tremble. “Call it practice,” he says.

Arthur doesn’t answer; he reads more. “Does he die?” he asks. 

“You’ll have to find out.”

“A bit silly,” Arthur says at the end of it, “for an omen to frighten him to death, if that was it. Better to use the warning, I’d say.”

“Well,” Alfred’s song pauses, “you’re here. Should I be taking that warning?”

“Ravens and Englishmen.” Arthur closes the magazine.

“And omens tapping at my window.” Alfred laughs. “My authors have all gone morbid on me. Seems like it should be your sort of thing.”

What authors? Arthur wants to ask, wants to dismiss them, but can’t, because this isn’t the first of Poe’s works he’s read, and even he’s found himself fascinated by him, by America, by Alfred’s endless, boundless imagination. He hates to think it might be giving him ideas, hates to think what these ideas mean to Alfred, hates to think of where they might have come from, because they seem wrong coming from this boy’s bright, ever-busy heart. 

Across the river, as evening settles into night, and the mist rises, Arthur can see Baton Rouge’s faint lights in the distance, glowing in the mist like fairy-lights or will o’ the wisps or the souls of the dead. Arthur wonders whether any of them had heard the Raven at their window tonight, and then wonders why he’d think that. This isn’t a fairytale, isn’t one of Alfred’s morbid fantasies.

Arthur stands and dusts off his trousers. There’re ravens and omens and a ship from a dream, riding the mist into the underworld, guiding the lit souls of the dead; he still doesn’t feel the shift. He turns to leave, towards the safety of his gas-lit room. Alfred doesn’t say goodnight.

Arthur wakes the next morning earlier than he intended too. They’re moored at the docks in Baton Rouge, and there’s still mist over everything. Dew beads across the painted rail of the deck and Arthur flicks water from his gloves when he notices it. The rising sun is burning streaks of gold and pink into the mist, lighting it like a flame, and its as he watches it that he notices Alfred isn’t there. The rail is empty, no banjo, no book, no morbid fairytale, and no too-brown bare feet. 

The boat’s docked and Arthur can hear the morning bustle as the crew unloads the old cargo and loads the new. There are shouts from the docks and steam on the water as Louisiana’s barely tolerable humidity begins to assert itself. A few other passengers are wandering out onto the docks; laughter and happy chattering fill his ears, along with the excited cries of children. 

The nearest to him are a pair of boys, blond and blue eyed and round faced, well dressed, beside their mother all in white. He can’t see her face. The brim of her hat shades it and he wonders why he cares. He’s sure there’s no wistfulness in his gaze as he watches them, watches one dart down the gangplank, dancing nimbly as he waves to his family behind. The other boy calls out to him, worried, when he nearly slips and catches himself with a yelp and a sheepish smile. The mother laughs fondly as she catches the cautious one’s hand and they follow. 

Still, Alfred is nowhere to be found. Well, if the boy can’t be bothered to accompany him (not that he wants the company) then Arthur is perfectly capable of exploring this city on his own. One of the crew tells him they’ll be pulling out it two hours. Arthur nods to him as he leaves.

Plenty of time.

A plentiful miss-mash of Cajun and Southern accents fill his ears as Arthur departs. He reminds himself that gentlemen do not snarl at lesser creatures like dogs and does his best to ignore the all-too-present reminder that this piece of America, though much had been his, had once belonged to France. 

There’s a market today, it seems, which is only logical, Arthur concludes, with the boat that’s just come in. He sees members of the crew here and there, some hauling, some browsing, some laughing with the local folk. He thinks he catches a flash of gold-blond hair, but it’s gone a moment later. It was probably just one of those boys. 

His brief glance for the color, however, shows him a ratty old alleyway, overshadowed with haphazard board roof-tops and littered with bits of wood and refuse that haven’t quite been cleaned out just yet. Arthur doesn’t really understand the pull he feels towards it, but today he’s curious enough to follow. Gentleman or not, he’s been in worse places.

Though perhaps his less than appropriate attire for such an area (rags and darned socks seemed to be the fashion of choice, not trim suits and bowler hats) is what leads to his most interesting encounter of the day. Disconcerting, not interesting, he thinks later (or was it).

“Oi fancy man!” 

The caller’s accent is thick, and Arthur follows the sound, stopping abruptly before a colorful curtain of a door, beaded and hung with what was once bright fabric, now worn with time and water and wind but still showing it’s brilliant colors. “Yes sir,” comes the drawl again. “Come on in.”

Arthur does. 

There are bones on the table, thrown and in a disarray Arthur can’t make sense of. Instinct tells him to look, but he can read nothing in the bones. Perhaps he’s lost that skill, or grown rusty with time. His people have long abandoned such things, really, though other such magics linger. Perhaps he just never learned it quite like this.

“Take a seat, fancy man.”

The man’s grin is shocking white against his dark skin. Arthur wonders at first what the man, boy (it’s hard to tell really, how old he is) has come from. Is he another of Alfred’s slaves? If so why is he hidden away here? He’s not too old to work, clearly, and his shoulders are broad if oddly tattooed, crossed here and there with black lines that make as little sense as the bones. A freed slave then, perhaps, Arthur thinks, for he can think of no slave master who would allow his property such garish decoration. The eyes watching him border between an ancient wisdom Arthur recognizes and sly confidence that makes his skin crawl. 

“You’re a lookin’ for somethin’,” the man says. He taps his finger against the wood of the over-turned crate his bones rest on and the bones rattle with the sound. It’s then that Arthur realizes what’s bothering him so.

The man’s eyes are blue.

Sparkling, shining blue. Sea blue. The blue of sky waters. They remind him of Alfred’s eyes, but Alfred has never looked like this: dirty, dark, with black hair spun so thick it curls against the scalp and no longer, and a chip of tin in one too-white tooth. 

Arthur takes the seat, an upturned barrel, offered him. “Of course I’m looking for something,” he responds. “It’s hardly unusual about these parts. Did you have someone watching me?” It’s a common enough trick for side-show fortune tellers.

The man laughs and the bones rattle as he slaps the crate, but they don’t turn over. Something’s keeping them there, some force of power or destiny or whatever it is Arthur can’t read. 

“Nah, not that. Somethin’ else fancy man, somethin’ else. You’re on a mighty journey you.”

“St. Louis is hardly far,” Arthur scoffs. “I’ve sailed longer.”

“Sailed sure, you’re sea folk alright.” There’s a twinkle in the man’s sky-blue eyes that Arthur doesn’t like. (Too similar, too similar he thinks, and he isn’t sure if it’s that which bothers him or something more.) “You’re travelin’ to find somethin’ you’ve lost.”

“Lost?” Arthur is lost, but not because of where he’s headed. 

“Lost, lost, sure,” the man tells him, “but you’ll not find what you seek here. Nor there, nor ‘long the way. You’ve got a long one ahead, mister fancy man, mister sea man, a longer journey than you’ve sailed yet.”

Arthur stands. He’s had enough of this foolishness. If the man just wants his money then he’d best do a better job of selling what he claims to see. “This is hardly some sort of Odyssey.” And you are hardly my Circe, he thinks. He turns to leave. “Good day,” he says, as he reaches to brush back the faded cloth. It’s not the bastard’s business anyway, whatever he thinks he sees. Arthur isn’t here looking for anything more than profit.

“Nah,” the fortune teller agrees as the cloth swings closed. “Odysseus’s journey was simpler.”

Arthur turns out of the alley. He’s not running, he’s not hiding. The man’s an idiot and there’s nothing he’s searching for but a quick pence. A quick pence at his former colony’s expense. Let the boy be useful for once, like he never was before. Perhaps he’s being harsh, but Arthur doesn’t care. He’s angry and he doesn’t know why, and he won’t let the why be that stranger’s words. 

He glances back only once, and in glancing he can’t see that alley again. He must have walked too far to see its entrance. 

The heat is beginning to grow unbearable, so Arthur heads back to the boat, not realizing he’s searching for two blond heads and children’s laugher. He finds the laughter, and the children, but not the gold. Those boys have not returned; they’re not on the boat and neither is their mother. It’s as if they were never there. There are other children of course, but not those two. Them and their mother, they’ve all stayed behind in the heat and the bustle and the dust covering the streets, with the laughing twang of Cajun voices.

Alfred returns as the sun sets. 

They’ve been paddling along for a good few hours now. The captain says it’ll be mid-day before they reach Port Hudson, and that it’s just a quick stop. It’s the sound of a banjo again that leads Arthur to where Alfred’s sitting, back on his railing, with a true song in his fingers now. 

Alfred doesn’t greet him when he comes close. His skin is browner than Arthur remembered it being last, as if he’s been in the sun a good long while, but he’s only been gone a day. He can’t have grown so dark so quickly. There’s a flash of metal when Alfred grins at him finally, but it’s gone in a blink, and Arthur’s sure it was just his imagination. 

“Brought you another one,” Alfred says, nodding to the table across from him. It’s a book this time, and one Arthur’s seen before but hasn’t quite bothered to read just yet. A good many of his own masters of literature have, however, so he knows what it contains. “Practicing again?” he asks as he picks it up and settles on one of the deck chairs. 

Alfred shrugs. “Maybe. That one’s kinda weird” 

Alfred stops playing as Arthur sits down to read The Man who was All Used Up, and a rustle of paper catches his ear. Still he thinks it a bit, well, desperate for him to feign any interest. Likely enough it isn’t anything particularly important. 

But when Arthur finishes he wonders whether Alfred chose the story for a reason, or only because he liked the thrill of attempting to rattle Arthur. 

“You ever feel like that?” Alfred asks. 

Arthur stares at him in surprise. “I’d think you’re a bit young to feel like that.”

Alfred, head buried in his papers, just smiles, and Arthur cannot admit to himself that the smile is one that breaks his heart.

\----

Natchez Under the Hill is as vile a place as Arthur can remember, for all they dock in what is clearly the nicer part of it. Clogged with cruel eyes, dirty bodies, suspicion and the gray smog of coal-fire smoke and riverboat steam, it reminds Arthur of times too soon passing (he won’t admit they’ve passed, for they haven’t just yet).

He finds it strange, standing amidst the crowd in such a place, not because he is unused to such places (he’s so very used to them, and a part of him loves them despite himself) but because he cannot reconcile that smiling naïve boy with the quagmire here. It feels too familiar, too much like himself, and he hates it. 

It makes him think, as he has many times, that if he had the strength, the will, he could have stolen that boy away from this stink of age, and the darkness of adulthood would never have touched him. It was a naïve dream, a fairytale, like those white manors on the hill, in the clouds, above the darkness but touched all the same, so he wants the strength to prove it could have been true.

Because the white is beautiful and the gray collects dirt on his skin that he can’t rub off.

He heads up the hill towards those white houses—wealth and beauty are there, clean and civilized and they can hide the dirt behind ears and under fingernails where it can’t be seen. He’s more comfortable when he can’t see it. Sometimes he wishes he were blind.

He rises out of the smog as he clears the hill, but not out of the crowd. All searching for something beyond and above, they’ve followed him here to go about their business (or has he been swept along in the tide, he doesn’t know). He passes a home and hears a shot—the whip fire crack of a rifle in the chattering, but he is the only one to freeze. It’s as if no one has heard it. 

A second shot rings, and still no one turns, no one cries out. He passes a cottage—white fence and roof and flowers—and hears a laugh.

“Not like that,” calls a man’s voice.

Arthur passes a tree and he sees them, one behind the other, big and small, gentle and smiling. The elder adjusts the rifle against the younger’s shoulder. There’s a bale of hay that’s been painted before them.

“Like this?” the younger asks. The elder laughs and another shot rings against the trees and the cottage and the flowers.

“Better.”

Arthur passes faster, rounding the scarlet rosebush at the corner and hears no more crack of the rifle behind. He sighs in relief. 

Somehow he finds himself in a quieter street. The crowd is gone, thank God, for his head is pounding. A little way up sits a pretty young woman, fashionably dressed, with her hands in her lap and her head bowed, but all Arthur sees is the empty space on the bench beside her and he feels his knees may shake apart if he doesn’t take it.

“May I join you?” he asks.

Reddened eyes over tear-streaked cheeks turn up to him, and once again Arthur is struck by blue. Beautiful, unfathomable blue, a blue like the sky he can’t reach and won’t say he’s ever wanted to. She nods to him. “Please forgive my state.” Her voice is a hoarse whisper. “Please sir, sit.” 

“It seems a pity for a lady such as yourself to be weeping like this.” There is nothing gallant in his voice, and there is no kindness in his face, but still the young woman (a girl really, she can’t be much older) smiles up at him through her tears, grateful, he supposes, for even the smallest sympathy. 

“Forgive me for troubling you sir,” she says, “I know you would rather not hear the troubles of a child, but if you could spare the moment to indulge me, perhaps a friendly ear may assist me.”

Selfish, Arthur thinks. She’s selfish, a child. Grown as she is she hardly could need the ear of a stranger, nor should she seek such a thing. It’s improper, he thinks, for a lady to expose herself such. Still, Arthur supposes, there is no harm, and her troubles cannot be so serious as to bother him for long. He can indulge her for the moment, and so he sits beside her, saying nothing, and she smiles at him.

“I thank you sir, though I still can’t think you have much interest in this.”

“I can be bothered for the moment, but do not expect me to solve your troubles.” 

And so she tells him, and Arthur finds he isn’t sure just why he sat down, but this woman seems to need an ear, he supposes, and he has little else to do today. It’s her mother, he learns, who is the trouble. Her mother who isn’t her mother, but a benevolent woman who has taken on this lovely little bastard child of her husband and raised her as her own, for she can have no children. She has betrothed this beautiful young woman with her sparkling blue eyes to a man she hasn’t chosen. 

It’s a common story, and not one that Arthur finds either particularly fixable, nor even all that interesting. It’s almost a fairytale really. Until this: “I can do better,” she says.

He’s fallen into something of a trance, he realizes, and Arthur shakes his head, uncrosses his legs, and stares at her. 

Her eyes are bright, determined, familiar. Her jaw is set and clenched, and there’s a fiery anger in her, and for a moment Arthur wonders just where Alfred had earned that disposition: was it his own spirit, or his people’s? Still it seems so natural that he can’t help but smile, even as it twists his gut. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“I can do better,” she replies. “She has given me so much, taught me so much, and I can do better.” Something Arthur recognizes all too well flashes in her eyes, and he hates it, but she’s still smiling. “I want her to be proud of me,” she says. “How can I repay her kindness, if all I become is the least of what I am? I must choose who I am,” that thing inside Arthur twists, “and become the strongest I can be. How else can I show her that her trouble was worth the effort? There are other men in this city, others far more wealthy and prestigious. I can win them.”

And she says it with such conviction that despite the naivety of it Arthur almost believes her. “She will be angry at you,” he says. “She cannot understand your reasoning.”

“I won’t allow her to see me as a disappointment.” Those eyes are dry now, blazing. She smiles at him. “Thank you sir, for lending me your time like this. I’m afraid I can’t offer much in return, but perhaps this.” She holds out a small blue handkerchief to him, and Arthur is struck, reminded of old knights and ladies of old and their tokens of affection. It’s patterned with blue bonnets, he sees, and scripted, and he suspects she embroidered it herself and it’s beautiful. 

Accomplished. 

He takes it. “It was no trouble,” he tells her, even if it was. 

She stands, that smile sun-bright. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

And then she’s gone in the crowd, and Arthur looks down at the handkerchief and that twisting stabs at his soul. I journey blind in hopes to see, is written in delicate cursive stitches across the fabric in his hand. There’s more but he doesn’t bother to read it. It means little anyway.

Alfred is late that evening. Arthur is the first to the place they’ve claimed on the boat deck and there is no story waiting.

Not yet. If Alfred comes Arthur suspects he’ll bring something. It’s a childish, if effective, method of avoiding awkward conversation and unwanted company and Arthur doesn’t bother asking why Alfred comes at all.

To torment him no doubt, or because he has nothing better to do (which isn’t true, Arthur knows, and again doesn’t want to think too hard on. He wants to think less on other possibilities). 

When two hours later Alfred still hasn’t appeared Arthur gives in and goes to find a cup of tea. Which they have, surprisingly, though it’s terribly expensive and only barely passable. He returns to the deck for a moment, guided by what he swears isn’t any sort of longing, but merely irritable curiosity and resigned expectation, and at last there Alfred is, in his usual place, his nose and shirt stained with dust and dirt and his golden hair sandy with it. There’s another magazine on the table and Alfred’s fiddling with something in his hands that glitters in the lamplight.

“Rather late aren’t you?” Arthur notes gruffly. 

“Didn’t realize you were waiting old man. Isn’t this past your bed time?”

“Is what I should be asking you.”

Alfred’s glasses are smudged. Arthur fiddles with the handkerchief in his pocket and resists the urge to wipe them clean. Let him be blind for his carelessness, Arthur doesn’t care. 

He sits down, sets his tea down and picks up the newest tale. The Fall of the House of Usher is one he’s read. He remembers enjoying the twisted tragedy of it, though seeing it here reminds him again that its Alfred’s people writing these things. This man whose stories Alfred insists he reads belongs to Alfred. Not war torn, cynical Europe, not tragedy loving Asia, not to Greece and his mother’s classic warnings against hubris.

It’s like the gray smog in Natchez harbor. It stinks of age and cynicism and growing up and this boy before him has not grown up, not grown up, not grown, he swears, because when he finally comes to believe it’s true then that truly is the end. Then he’ll truly have to let that boy go. 

He can’t, not yet. He’s not strong enough yet. He failed once to keep Alfred young forever, safe forever, and he can’t fail again. Not until the world is his and even Alfred must accept his protection. He just needs the strength to win him back.

It’s late, too late, these stories cry to him. He reads the passage of the narrator’s fable and it screams louder. The dragon is him, he thinks. The knight is Alfred. Alfred would destroy him and as the shield falls he would destroy himself. There is no hope; it’s too late and Alfred has grown. Despair clutches at Arthur’s chest and he slams the magazine down with a bang. His teacup rattles. Blue eyes stare at him. Gold glitters in Alfred’s hand.

“Do you mean to mock me?” Arthur asks him.

There’s a familiar snarl on Alfred’s lips. “You’ll never understand, will you?”

You would destroy me for your own gain, you selfish boy, Arthur thinks. A dragon guarding treasure you cannot understand. I would have shared it with you if you had only not believed a written fable—that dream of democracy and freedom. You had freedom. With me you had freedom, and now that shield’s clang is echoing across the world. How long until you realize you’ve destroyed yourself? 

He doesn’t say it. What point is there? Alfred claims he doesn’t understand, but in truth it is Alfred who doesn’t.

“Who, then, is the Mad Trist’s dragon?”

Alfred jumps down off the rail. There’s something haunted in his eyes as he walks towards the cabin door. He pauses as he reaches it, just before he enters, and whispers one word Arthur will never believe.

He’s gone then, and Arthur doesn’t see him again that night, nor the next, nor the next. There are no more stories, no more banjo music and no more twinkling gold, just one word echoing like the clang of that shield in Arthur’s mind as he thinks:

“Me.” 

\---- 

He’s been through Memphis now, and Ciro and Cape, and they’ll pass Cape Girardeau in the morning. It’s been a strange journey, though he’s no more found what he’s apparently lost than he has made sense of the whole thing. Frankly Arthur can’t say he’ll be sad to see it end. 

Sitting at his table on the deck Arthur reminisces on the oddities—the people he sees once and never again, the mystic and the girl, the children and the brothers. Memphis too brought its own mysteries, as strange and unpleasant as the last.

Thinking on Alfred’s strange words, he had passed two men on their way to the market. They’d been fighting, father and son, and he was inexplicably reminded of that girl. “I want her to be proud of me,” she’d said. 

How could a parent take pride in such ill mannered stubbornness?

He doesn’t want to think on how the boy had pleaded with his father, how his words had made sense. Stuck in one place, if he had the mind for better things then shouldn’t the father be proud? Shouldn’t he wish the boy to be more? But to lose one you wish to protect to uncertainty, that Arthur understands the fear of. The boy cannot know he will succeed. His father knows best and will guide him to a safe life, if perhaps not one that will fully realize the boy’s potential. That’s the father’s prerogative. 

A sensible one, Arthur thinks (though part of him is screaming no, no, what would you have done in that boy’s place!). Destroy the guardian, drop the shield and risk crumbling under one’s own weight. 

His second meeting was hardly as thought provoking. Once again Arthur found himself seated beside a stranger—an old man this time, and near the docks, but after witnessing that fight Arthur found he didn’t want to go far.

The man seemed amiable enough, Arthur thought, and he appreciated that he didn’t chatter. Arthur frankly enjoyed the silence. It wasn’t until he stood to return to the boat that the man said anything at all.

“Thank you.”

Arthur stared down at him. “I can’t think of what for.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone by my side.”

As Arthur left that place, he had to hold back tears and he does because he always does and he doesn’t know why they’re there anyway, so why should he let them make a fool of him. It’s just, he thinks later, that it’s because it’s been a long time for him too.

Too long.

Forever.

It’s worse, he thinks, knowing there was someone once that he thought would stay by his side always, and he knows that man feels the same. It doesn’t matter, he realizes, all those colonies, because they’re not by his side. They’re at his feet and if he brings them up they’ll only hurt him too. 

They’ll hurt him, like the one that already did.

So he’s grateful that Alfred didn’t appear that night, nor the next. The dragon could sleep easy on its treasure, even if the shield on the wall had already fallen. For the moment, Arthur was safe from more than thoughts.

\----

But Alfred does come to him again on that boat. One last time he comes, and Arthur can’t help but think he looks exhausted. Serves the boy right, troubling him like this, trying to do too much. He should have stayed safe where he belonged. 

The story isn’t on the table this time, it’s in Alfred’s hands. Worker’s hands, Arthur notices, brown and calloused, with short broken fingernails and the scars of time and effort. There’s dirt under the nails, but it doesn’t hide like it should—its in the knuckles and the lines too, bold and there for all to see. 

“You should wash your hands,” Arthur says as he takes the story. Alfred gives him a look that clearly asks why he should care. “You will someday,” is the only answer Arthur can give him, and it’s a lie because even Arthur isn’t sure if he’s reached that someday just yet.

“The Tell-tale Heart,” Arthur reads the title aloud.

It’s another he’s read, he realizes. All but the first are now long told tales, and only the omen was new. He doesn’t think of any meaning for it, and he means not to bring more tension into this meeting than already exists (not yet!) so he indulges Alfred and sits down to read. 

“Can you hear it?” Alfred asks him, before Arthur can say anything.

“What is there to hear?”

Alfred is silent the rest of the night. At first Arthur wonders if the boy is admitting a guilt of some kind, in bringing him this tale, but as the silence stretches and the night moves on, until the soft waves and the slap of the paddle wheel are so loud Arthur feels they may deafen him, he wonders if it is that at all. 

He still cannot hear what Alfred wants him to hear.

Alfred is there in the morning, the first time Arthur has seen him in the daylight. He looks worn, Arthur thinks. Tired and fragile, with circles under his eyes.

“A good night’s sleep would do you some good,” Arthur remarks as they part.

“You’re hardly in a position to mother me.”

Arthur scowls. “A situation of your own choosing. You’ve made that clear enough.”

He isn’t sure if it’s rage or despair in Alfred’s eyes as he moves to step away, but it makes him smile to himself. For all the trouble Alfred has caused him, the boy deserves a little pain. “Don’t act like such a child,” he says. “Isn’t that what I used to tell you?”

Alfred is silent again as Arthur passes him, and when Arthur turns to look back once more he’s gone like a ghost. Arthur huffs—not even a proper goodbye!—and he steps down the plank into St. Louis.

At the bottom, a blind man, eyes cloudy blue, holds a hand out to him and smiles with crooked teeth. “Sir,” he asks, “would you lend me a hand?”

Arthur moves by before the man can notice he’s gone.

\----

15 years later, war breaks across America, and rends him in two, and Arthur can’t find the heart to care. The most he can care for is what profit he’s made from that recluse of a former colony, and nothing more. 

It’s more than 90 years later, when Arthur finds himself sitting in a quaking bomb shelter, beneath London, a half-finished letter clutched in one burn-scarred hand and a leather bound copy of Poe’s works in his lap that, for just an instant, he hears the beat of a heart and a dragon’s mournful cry and wonders.

Just what had Alfred wanted him to hear?

The page beginning The Raven is marked with an age-stained handkerchief.

I journey blind in hopes to see, for those who see are never alone.

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic was intended originally to be a good deal happier than it turned out. Go figure, that’s what I get for using Poe for metaphor in a pre-Civil War context, or ever. 
> 
> The fic’s intended date is in 1846, but could honestly take place anytime between 1845 when The Raven was published and the start of the American Civil War.
> 
> Romanticism became popular in America following the rise of the movement in Europe in the second half of the 18th century, though it didn’t really take strong root until the early 19th century there. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving are among well known authors of the period. 
> 
> The four Edgar Allan Poe works used here are:  
> -The Raven, published in (The New York) Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845  
> -The Man who was All Used Up, published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839  
> -The Fall of the House of Usher, published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1839  
> -The Tell-tale Heart, published in The Pioneer in January 1843
> 
> Ports used were real Mississippi riverboat ports through the 1800s. More info on said riverboats can be found here: 
> 
> Natchez Under the Hill was a well used riverboat port for cotton transportation. Natchez also played home, for a time, to 5 of America’s 19th century millionaires. Prior to the Civil War, Natchez had the most millionaires per-capita of any city in the US. 
> 
> Despite the heavy literature reference abuse in this fic, the saying on the handkerchief is totally made up.


End file.
